Tony Parsons is a bestselling novelist and an award-winning journalist. He began his career in journalism as a music writer on the NME.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

The Germans have a word for it: willkommenskultur, a culture of welcome. It is a concept that is only possible in an affluent, tolerant, enlightened democracy - you can't have a culture of welcome when your people are starving or if you live in a police state. But Germany's willkommenskultur is real, a noble sentiment that is haunted by the ghosts of the last century.

Willkommenskultur was necessary in a country where the wealthy, free West Germany was for 45 years divided from the poor, communist East Germany, then painfully - and expensively - reunified after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's culture of welcome also springs from a deeper, darker well, the collective memory of a time when the Germans did not attempt to welcome those who were different, but to exterminate them.

The perfect expression of willkommenskultur came when Syrian refugees arrived at Munich station in September and were applauded by the locals. Is there any other nation on earth where refugees would be clapped for showing up? The welcome was warm and genuine - but the Germans were also applauding themselves, happy to finally be the world's good guys. And how sweet the sound of applause must have seemed to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has always made her response to the migrant crisis sound like a moral crusade.

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"If we start having to apologise for showing a friendly face in emergencies," said Merkel, "then this is not my country."

Merkel, an east European, knows what it is like to grow up behind walls and wire, and to be a migrant in a richer land. But then the weather changed and so did public opinion. Willkommenskultur was confronted by its great dilemma. The desperate needs of the developing world have no end. But German resources do.

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By October, Merkel's approval ratings had dropped below 50 per cent for the first time in four years. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was reporting that the chancellor was planning dramatic cutbacks on Germany's wanton generosity to Syrian refugees - ending the automatic right of family members to join those already in Germany, cutting the residency right of Syrians from three years to one. Apparently it wasn't enough to give the refugees a round of applause and a cuddly toy - they all needed jobs, homes, medical care, money and education for their children. And happy integration was far from inevitable.

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A report prepared by Germany's security and intelligence services was leaked to the newspaper Welt Am Sonntag. It stated, "We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding." The document warned of a furious backlash waiting down the autobahn. "German security agencies will not be in the position to solve these imported security problems and thereby the arising reactions from Germany's population... Mainstream civil society is radicalising because the majority don't want migration and they are being forced by the political elite."

The report by the German security services did not make limitless immigration sound like a morally good thing to do. It made it sound like national suicide.

Yet nobody is allowed to question the essential goodness of obliterating European borders. Chancellor Merkel's moral imperialism has stifled all debate and dissent. Eastern European leaders who disagree with her are denounced as racists who do not embody "European values", as if unrestricted immigration has always been a well-loved feature of life on the continent.

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Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, was singled out for particular criticism as Hungary erected a 109-mile razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia. Orban's concern was that the overwhelming majority of the migrants are Muslim.

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"Islam was never part of Europe," said Orbán. "It's the rulebook of another world."

This kind of talk is considered unforgiveable by the moral imperialists. "Let them in!" advised Pharrell Williams on stage in Italy (as if the US doesn't have a border with Mexico). "F*** the politicians!" seethed Benedict Cumberbatch in one of his nightly on-stage lectures after playing Hamlet. This was moral imperialism at its most virulent - as though opposing unfettered immigration was not simply an alternative view, but inherently evil.

It was both Merkel's personal history and the history of her nation that made her open- door policy possible. The long shadows of Nazi Germany; the high walls around the East Germany of Merkel's childhood. And although they call her Mutti Merkel - mummy Merkel - it is telling that the chancellor is childless, and perhaps less concerned about what Germany will look like two or three generations in the future. And Germany will certainly be a far more Islamic country.

But Germany has had no great terrorist trauma to make them wary of letting in overwhelmingly Muslim migrants. There has been no German equivalent of 9/11 or 7/7 or the Charlie Hebdo massacre. There are very few German Muslims rushing off to join Islamic State. And consequently there has been no serious thought about how well all these overwhelmingly Muslim newcomers will integrate - or perhaps not - in tomorrow's Germany. The assumption has always been that they will soon all be wearing lederhosen, supporting Bayern Munich and believing in the equality of the sexes. Possibly this is too optimistic.

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Thanks to Chancellor Merkel's limitless generosity, Germany has let in an unknown number of migrants. One figure, leaked to Bild magazine from inside the government, suggests it could be as high as 1.5 million in 2015 alone. Not all of them were Syrians. Not all of them were fleeing war. Not all of them have enlightened views on women.

In a letter dated 18 August 2015, four women's organisations wrote to the minister for social affairs and integration in Hesse, expressing concerns about the 5,000 asylum seekers crammed into former US military bases in Giessen, western Germany.

"It is a fact that women and children are unprotected," said the letter. "This situation is opportune to those men who already regard women as their inferior and treat unaccompanied women as 'fair game'. As a consequence, there are reports of numerous rapes, sexual assaults and increasingly of forced prostitution. These are not isolated incidents."

But it is a bit late to start worrying about social cohesion. Mutti's reckless generosity has turned one of the great European nations into a refugee camp. The strains on infrastructure have been monumental. In the western German town of Eschbach, Gabrielle Keller received a letter from her landlord telling her that the apartment block where she had lived for 23 years was being turned into a refugee shelter. "I think it's a scandal to throw tenants out of their apartments," she told Die Welt.

It was an experience replicated across Germany. In Hardheim in the southwest, 1,000 migrants were sent to live among 4,600 residents. A 1,000-year-old town was changed out of all recognition almost overnight.

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But the problems of Merkel's moral imperialism feel like just the beginning. Will the newcomers settle happily in Germany? Will they integrate? Will their children and their grandchildren grow up to be fulfilled German citizens? Fingers crossed, eh, Mutti?

Merkel continues to insist that there is "no upper boundary" to the number of refugees that Germany will accept. With thousands of refugees still sleeping in tents as winter temperatures drop below freezing, this flies in the face of reality. Even Merkel's allies are saying that Germany is struggling.

"There are real limits to how much pressure we can put on our cities," Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democratic Party, told Der Spiegel magazine. "Our reception capacity is limited," said Joachim Gauck, a former human rights activist. Germans now realise that "feed the world" is easier sung than done.

For the regular visitor to Germany, it was not remarkable that Merkel faced a growing chorus of criticism. What was amazing was that she was still so popular. But with more than 500 attacks on refugee centres in 2015, her no-borders policy did not feel like an act of moral goodness. All her good intentions seemed to have laid the foundations for a terrifying backlash. As the ancient forces of fascism begin to stir in Germany, it does not seem like Merkel has done something profoundly, unquestionably good.

It feels like she has been stupid, reckless and wrong.

Yet the belief persists that it is morally correct to champion limitless immigration, that it is possible for all the world's oppressed, hungry and unhappy to come and live in the West. The great lie persists that we can solve the problems of the world with a pious Twitter hashtag. Moral imperialism encourages sensible folk to make promises they are unlikely to keep.

There are four million displaced Syrian refugees on the planet and none of them are living with Nicola Sturgeon, although the SNP leader sounded absolutely unequivocal about giving a Syrian family a room under her roof.

"Yes, I would absolutely be happy to do that as part of a bigger, wider, more organised approach," she told Sky News. But it turns out there are, in fact, no plans for her to share her home with any of those four million refugees.

We need to deal with the greatest tide of human migration since 1945 with more than moral imperialism. By promising to give a safe German home to anyone who wants it, Merkel did not do a good thing. Far from being an act of human kindness, Merkel's grand gesture will result in untold human misery that will endure beyond our lifetimes.

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Merkel will learn that no nation on earth - no matter how wealthy, well-intentioned or tormented by guilt for the war crimes of its past - can give a safe European home to the desperate millions in the developing world who would love one.

The town of Sumte, near the river Elbe in eastern Germany, had a population of just 102 until it was obliged to accommodate 750 migrants almost overnight. Moral imperialists like Angela Merkel, Benedict Cumberbatch and Pharrell Williams should reflect on the 102 residents of Sumte.

And summon up a little compassion for those poor suckers.

This article was first published in the February 2016 issue of GQ magazine